Pages

Sunday, January 4, 2009

More 'Fat Burning' Basics with Math, Too!

In the previous post, I reviewed what happens, chemically, when you 'burn fat.' As I mentioned, you are always burning fat for energy. But, most of you want to know, how do I burn off my body fat? In order to do that, you need to create an energy deficit. Body fat stores, in the adipose tissue, are an extremely dense form of energy. In fact, the energy concentration is greater than that of TNT (dynamite). Unfortunately, you cannot convert the fat energy as rapidly as TNT is converted to energy (hence the big explosion, what a sight that would be if you could). A pound of body fat has about 3500 Calories, or 14,650,000 Joules of energy. What does that mean? Well a watt, which most of you are familiar with from the kb snatch challenge, is a power output of one joule per second. If you averaged a power output of 40 watts, it would take you 99.65 hours to burn one pound of fat! Of, course you burn additional energy just to maintain your body, but I wanted to give you an appreciation of how much energy is in a pound of fat.

Relax, it is easier to burn body fat than I may be leading you to believe. I will discuss how to create a calorie deficit in another post.

5 comments:

AAAGGGHHH, I am never going to get there.:)I suppose that means more burpees, and kettle bell snatches. It is a New Year with more determination than ever:)Anyone going to join me in the mini Tri. at Carmel this year. End of April. Plenty of time to train with Dan and be ready....

The date of the Tri. is April 19th. it is a Sunday morning. web site is www.carmelswimclub.org/triathlon This site will give you all the info. plus let you register:) Hope you can do it. For a race it is very relaxed and easy to navigate. Let me knowLiz.